ON April 22 or 23, 1945 Adolf
Hitler considered the war lost. He
gave SS SturmbannführerJohannes Göhler (since August
1944 attached to Führer's
headquarters as adjutant of SS
Gruppenführer Hermann
Fegelein, Hitler's liaison officer to
Heinrich Himmler) a job: to fly out
of Berlin to Bavaria, locate and destroy
two Tropenkisten containing Eva
Braun's private effects: these
contained what Göhler describes as
bundles of hundreds of letters exchanged
with Hitler, and her diaries, and other
personal relics.

At first I believed this order had been
complied with. After an interview with
Göhler on March 27, 1971, I
wrote:

"He flew in Hitler's Ju290 to
Berchtesgaden (Salzburg) and arranged
for the destruction among others of all
of Hitler's personal correspondence
with Eva Braun. There were 'several
hundred' handwritten letters exchanged
between them, going back to the 1930's,
he assumes. He ordered a
HauptsturmführerErwin
Haufler, who died recently in
Stuttgart, to destroy them before
witnesses and obtained a certificate to
that effect. The letters were in a
Tropenkiste (a tin army trunk)."

He repeated the story in November 1973;
on November 4, however, his wife (now his
ex-wife) Ursula née
Krüger, told me in confidence
that the papers had not been destroyed:
she knew for certain. Breaking down in
tears, she admitted that while her husband
was interned by the Americans, she had
survived by [. . .
working]
with Special Agent Robert A.
Gutierrez (Feb 1946: head of Special
Investigations Squad, American C.I.C.
Detachment 970-45) based in Schloss
Backnang near Stuttgart, whose task was to
locate top Nazis including Martin
Bormann, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun,
as well as their papers and secret hoards
of foreign and German currency; that she
had collaborated with this Special Agent,
helping him to entrap former S.S. officers
and war criminals, some subsequently
executed; and that among these S.S.
officers was the aforementioned Haufler,
who admitted under questioning that he had
not in fact destroyed the Hitler and Eva
Braun relics, but had hidden them.

Gutierrez had found these valuables in
1945-6, had turned over some to the
Seventh Army, but had retained the
"white-leather bound" diaries and letters.
She was certain of this: she had read
through them for the C.I.C., and packed
them into his suitcase when he returned to
America in 1946. She described in
particular how the diaries had the EB
[monogram].
She believed the Pentagon may have given
some of them to a Major John R.
Angolia (1983: now living at
Leavenworth, Ks.) a number of
Morell, Eva Braun and other objects
to use as bait in his 1970s CIA work in
Germany; he certainly has original Morell
files and other items that she last saw in
the Eva Braun trunk. Located by me in
November 1973, however, Angolia told me he
had obtained these materials from a
Tony Perry, a former British army
major, who got them from the "man who
brought them back"; Perry was living in
1970 at 8801 Towanda St., Philadelphia,
Pa, tel. (215) CH2 6351. I telephoned
Perry on November 30, and he said he got
the Fegelein materials in Philadelphia,
and could not recall offhand the source.
He stonewalled.

On December 1 and 2, 1973 I visited
Gutierrez in New Mexico. He warned me by
telephone that he had contacted the
Pentagon and they had forbidden him to
talk about his wartime intelligence role.
Visited at his home, he admitted much of
the story, but stonewalled when questioned
about the missing papers of Eva Braun and
the letters and diaries. In January 1974,
Frau Göhler reversed her story -- she
had not seem him pack the documents, only
souvenirs of Eva Braun. By February 1974
he would only admit that to tell me more
would "implicate" too many people, as he
put it.

In 1975 I deposited my file of letters,
verbatim telephone conversations and
interview records on this case in the
Institute of Contemporary History in
Munich, marking it "not to be read without
my permission."

On December 5, 1976 I interviewed Frau
Ursula Göhler again. She was
displeased, said that Gutierrez had
written to her complaining that she had
"dropped him in it". She denied saying she
saw him packing Eva Braun materials into
his case, there was never any talk of
Hitler's letters to Eva, only of her
diaries and albums. "She now maintains
that all these objects were 'gone' long
before Gutierrez returned to the States."
She identified Gutierrez's interpreter
"Bill" (i.e. William Conner) as a
Washington lawyer who returned to the
States before Gutierrez.

The US Army Intelligence and Security
Command, at Fort Meade has now, after
eight years, released
the Gutierrez files which I applied
for in 1974 on Göhler, Haufler and
the others associated with the case. These
confirm in dramatic detail the story of
how the C.I.C. tracked down the S.S.
officers' attempts to conceal these
materials, and recovered them. The diaries
and letters did exist. They were captured.
Where are they now? I have now written the
Institute in Munich reminding them that
nobody must read my file on the case. The
Göhlers are still alive and are
assisting me. I am reopening the
search.